Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Portrait of a Psychopath

Cover illustration:
Artist’s rendering of Muhammad entering either Medina after his flight from
Mecca in 622, or entering Mecca on his return in 630 on a pilgrimage prior to
his compelling its surrender and conversion to Islam. Illustrator unknown.

As a “prophet,” Muhammad was a
late bloomer. He didn’t begin hearing voices or having hallucinations about
Allah’s prescription for living and dying until 610 A.D., when he was forty
years old. Twelve years later he and a handful of his converts and followers took
an urgent powder from Mecca, populated by the Quraysh, who were hostile to his
blasphemy against their numerous pagan gods, and fled to Medina (then called
Yathrib), populated by the Khazraj tribe. It was in Medina that he developed
Islam by having numerous personal sessions with Allah through the medium of an
angel, Gabriel (aka, Jibreel). Or so
he would claim at the drop of a turban, which was often.

Islam, after closer examination, was and
still is all about Muhammad. And about nothing else.You had to take his word for everything he said had happened or will happen. He
insisted on it, forcefully. Like a berserker. There isn’t a single totalitarian
regime that wasn’t also a personality cult. Islam fits that description.
Muhammad is its personality, and Islam is his
cult.

He was the Billy Sunday of his time in that
region, or if you like, a supreme showman in the way of P.T. Barnum. By the
time of his death in July 632 at the age of sixty-two, Muhammad had converted
all of the Arabian Peninsula to Islam, by hook, crook, military conquest,
banditry, torture, extortion, genocide, terror, and murder. He was born in 570,
the “Year of the Elephant,” but very likely had never seen or heard of an
elephant. But Islam, especially after his demise and because of the missionary
efforts of his successors, spread through the Peninsula and all compass points
like scalding coffee through a cheap paper towel.

Another appropriate comparison would be
that Muhammad was the Jim Jones of his time, skillful in manipulating the
gullible, but his Kool-Aid was Islam,
which didn’t poison men, but instead their minds, and turned them into “Walking
Dead” zombies.

Or, picture Muhammad as a kind of Rev.
Jeremiah Wright, ranting to his congregation about hell and damnation and God-damning
the Jews and Christians and all unbelievers, his Koran-thumping eliciting vocal expressions of spontaneous fervor
among the flock. That was, more or less, Muhammad’s preaching style. He was a
master of working his credulous converts into near hysterics, if not into a
revival tent, rolling-on-the-ground lather and foaming at the mouth for
salvation.

That’s if you believe he even existed, and
have instead speculated that the whole Muhammad story was woven out of whole
cloth over centuries by Islamic scholars and scribes in search of the perfect
and unalterable Koran, supposedly
dictated verbatim by Allah to Muhammad, but which they were willing to emend,
correct, embellish, and edit. These worthies labored to preserve the original
Meccan verses – the banal “peaceful” ones – but abrogate them with the violent
ones, over a hundred of them. It’s the violent ones that defined Islam in
Muhammad’s time and which define it in our own. The implication is that these
ancient editors were also hearing voices. "Press one for Arabic, press two
for Aramaic. You have reached Seventh Heaven….Please, leave a message stating
your question….”

Also the Hadith (plural), the
collection of personal behavior, practices, recollections, and predilections of
Muhammad, underwent serious revision over the centuries in order to make them
comport more closely with the Koran. This
perpetual project was an attempt to “humanize” Muhammad, to demonstrate that he
was just like everyone else.

Or not.

Nevertheless, purists and Islamapologists
near and far will damn F.W. Burleigh’s narrative of the life of Muhammad, It’s All About Muhammad: A Biography of the World’s Most Notorious
Prophet, or ignore it and just mutter under their breath. Muslim
demonstrators will more likely froth at the mouth and develop laryngitis, as is
their habit, because Burleigh’s book also boasts twenty-five pen-and-ink line
illustrations, many of them depicting Muhammad at various points in his itinerant
career.

The last one shows him giving a “thumbs-up”
to Allah, both them seated on separate thrones in judgment of a cringing
supplicant on the Day of Resurrection.In
that scenario, Muhammad is acting as a kind of plea-deal attorney for those
seeking to enter Paradise and be saved from a sentencing to eternal hellfire
but had extenuating circumstances to reveal. He appointed himself to that role.
After all, Allah is nothing if not “merciful” and open to suggestions from his
“prophet,” while Muhammad was, to put it gently, full of himself. There was no
appeal once a judgment had been made.

Among the verses is
a celestial advisory that Muhammad must be obeyed: “It is not fitting for a
Believer, man or woman, when a matter has been decided by Allah and His
Messenger to have any option about their decision: if any one disobeys Allah
and His Messenger, he is indeed on a clearly wrong Path.”—Koran, 33:36. Note 12, Chapter 33, “Terror Has Made Me Victorious,” It’s All About Muhammad.

To call him merely narcissist would be letting
him off easy. He invented the shadada as the universal profession of
faith: “There is only one God and Muhammad is his Prophet (or Messenger).” Burleigh
relates numerous instances of a person suspected of secret paganism or apostasy
reciting the shadada to Muhammad to
save himself from a beheading or some other form of execution. It was supposed
to act as verbal shield. Often, the recitation fell on deaf ears.

And, yes, Muhammad consummated his marriage
to nine-year-old Aisha, the daughter of his most loyal follower, Abu Bakr,
adding pedophilia to his criminal “rap sheet,” in addition to the rape of
captured women and girls after raids on caravans and Arab towns. “Weepy” Bakr,
who at first objected to the proposed union, nevertheless served Muhammad to
his dying day as his adviser, advance man, press agent, and public relations consultant.
His submission to his employer’s desires served as an example for countless
generations of Muslim parents who arranged the forced marriages of their prepubescent
daughters, and still do, up to this day.

Burleigh’s biography is a compelling read,
at times entertaining, but mostly informative. He brings to life what to most
Westerners, and even to most Muslims, has been an abstraction, an untouchable
icon never to be depicted, slandered, libeled, or mocked under pain of a death fatwa. Drawing on authoritative texts of
the Koran and Hadith, together with the interpretations, histories and revisions
by commentators such as Ibn Ishaq, Ibn Warraq, Al-Tabari, Edward Gibbon, Ahmed
Qiresjo, and the translations of J.M. Rodwell, Abdullah Yusuf Ali, and M.H.
Shakir, among others, the author presents an indelible picture of Muhammad the
Monster who loosed a virulent evil on the world over fourteen centuries.

While Burleigh has proved himself a
creditable and dauntless researcher of all the Islamic sources, and from
translations and interpretations from respected contemporary sources (there are
47 pages of end notes, and a five-page bibliography), one must take those
sources with a generous dose of skepticism, because the Koran and the Hadith were
works-in-progress for centuries. Robert Spencer’s book, Did
Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry Into Islam’s Obscure Origins, would be an ideal companion to Burleigh’s work. Burleigh
performed the unenviable task of weaving together fourteen centuries worth of
myriad tribal alliances and animosities, myths, lore, and legends, including commentaries,
corrections, and interpretations by Islamic scholars and contemporary (i.e.,
modern) Muhammad and Islam authorities, into a coherent, linear, and
comprehensible narrative.

Allah, the Supreme Mentor and Author, his
alleged omniscience to the contrary notwithstanding, kept adding and changing
things. There is no evidence that he minded the constant deletions and
retentions and sent down thunderbolts to fry those who dared meddle with his
words.As for Muhammad, no one else had
been given a ride to Heaven on a winged mule to meet holy notables and stand
before Allah’s blinding throne. Why, in Jerusalem, he had even taught Abraham
and Jesus how to pray properly. So he claimed – or else.

It is difficult for Westerners to imagine
Arabs as other than Muslims. But in Muhammad’s time, the majority of them were
pagans, worshipping a bewildering menagerie of deities. The “prophet” set out
to correct and outlaw this, and once he had destroyed the statues in the Kaaba
in Mecca, he forbad idolatry in all forms, including of Allah and himself. This
will partly explain the murderous riots over the Muhammad
cartoons of 2005. Not that the cartoonists were idolizing Muhammad. Quite
the opposite.

Burleigh reveals that Muhammad must have experienced
an unhappy, “fatherless” childhood, having been given to a wet nurse for about
three years by his mother. Halimah, the wet nurse, returned him to his mother
claiming he was possessed by a demon. Why?

Burleigh explains that Muhammad must have
had a damaged frontal lobe, and was subject also to epileptic fits (these are
described or alluded to by Islam scholars). In Muhammad’s time, there was no other
name for epilepsy except for the “falling sickness.” These conditions persisted
throughout his life, but it was during these seizures that he had auditory and
mental hallucinations about Allah and Gabriel. This is one reason why Meccans
believed he was “touched in the head” or possessed by a demon. It was the only
diagnosis they were capable of at the time. Combine these circumstances with an
inbred paranoia, an inferiority complex, and a tenacious strain of obsessive compulsiveness,
with an urge to “govern” others, and there was a recipe for the making of a
psychopath. Overall, Muhammad and his record make Hannibal Lector look like a
vegetarian devotee of tea and crumpets.

Of course, one needn’t have an abnormal
frontal lobe to become a terrorist, nor even a dose of paranoia. Just an
unhealthy strain of nihilism, of wanting to kill those who love life, and of a
desire to end one’s own in the same action.

Muhammad demanded loyalty of his followers,
but displayed little of it himself. For example, having met, Zaynab, the wife
of his adopted son, Zayd, and ogled and lusted after her to distraction, he
proposed that his son divorce her so he could marry her. The loyal son
submitted. His reward was to be “divorced” from his adoptive father, who,
sensing his son’s resentment, subsequently reported a new diktat from Allah: Adoption was now forbidden, and retroactively,
Zayd was never his adopted son. Out the window went all inheritance rights, as
well.

Muhammad was thorough in his war against
the Jews (about whom, before his “visions,” he had borne no animus.) When he
conquered the Qurayza Jews near Medina, he had all the males and boys, between
four and nine hundred of them, beheaded, his two cousins welding the swords far
into the night. The women and children were taken as booty by his army, or sold
at auction in distant slave markets to raise money for horses and weapons.

The current onslaught of ISIS, or the
Islamic State, through Syria and Iraq, proves that Islamic methods and ends are
consistent and have not changed a whit since Muhammad’s time. Mass executions,
mass rapine, looting, brutal conquest, and the imposition of barbaric Sharia
law have been the practice ever since then.

Muhammad’s hubris included making himself a
direct descendent or successor of Abraham and Jesus. He borrowed or cadged
elements of Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and various pagan faiths to
cobble together his new religion (just as Christians borrowed from Greek and
Roman religions before him).

There are interesting stories about the
origin of the term “Allah.”

Classical Arabic
co-existed with the Old North Arabian languages. In the 5th century BC,
Herodotus (Histories I,131; III,8) quotes the
epithet of a goddess in its pre-classical Arabic form as Alilat
(Ἀλιλάτ, i. e.,ʼal-ʼilat).

"The name Allah, as the Quran itself is witness, was well known in
pre-Islamic Arabia. Indeed, both it and its feminine form, Allat, are found not
infrequently among the theophorous names in inscriptions from North
Arabia".

Doubtless, one of the many statues in the Kaaba ordered destroyed by Muhammad
upon his conquest of Mecca in 630 was of Hubal, the moon-god. Apparently it was a regal human form made of
onyx. Perhaps “Allah” was a minor moon-god or goddess whose statue also merited
a place in the temple and in 630 its destruction. The deity was worshipped by
pagans in other parts of the Arabian Peninsula.

The irony is that the Kaaba (or Kabah, or the “Cube”), which Muhammad
helped to reconstruct in 605 when a flash flood damaged the sorry excuse for a
temple that housed all the pagan idols, was virtually rebuilt by a shipwrecked
Copt Christian, Baqum, largely from the remnants of his beached vessel in Jeddah
on the Red Sea. Baqum supervised the reconstruction and was a skilled carpenter
and mason who ensured that the new stone walls, a yard thick at the base, would
not collapse during another flash flood.

Muhammad devised and refined the ablution, or the ritual cleansing, which
Muslims are obliged to perform five times a day.

…It begins with the rinsing the hands and mouth, cleaning the nostrils by
breathing in water and blowing it out, washing the face, scrubbing the right
arm up to the elbow and then the left arm – each step of this routine performed
three times. The ritual continues with wiping the head, ears, and neck with wet
hands. The cleansing is finalized by washing both feet up to the ankles, also
performed three times, beginning with the right foot.

The prayer routine, equally elaborate, is characterized by precise motions
of the body and arms, with exactness in placing the palms of the hands and toes
of the feet while the body flexes forward and the forehead touches the ground.
The prayer protestations are preceded by ritual motions one performs while
standing and are followed by exacting posture while sitting on one’s knees, camel-like.

Muhammad was soon washing and praying like this five times a day, seven
days a week….

Failure [by his followers] to properly perform the ritual cleansing and
prayer routines would invalidate them in the eyes of Allah, Muhammad declared.
(p. 80)

Muhammad performed his ablutions even more often than five times a day, to
set an example for his followers, or because he was anxious about solving a
problem or when he experienced a setback. The head-banging part of it must not
have done much for his frontal lobe. Often his followers would note that his
forehead was black and blue after performing multiple ablutions.

Muhammad also originated everything we are familiar with today when we
encounter or think of Islam: Compulsory veils (of various forms) for women in
public; allowing a Muslim man four wives (Muhammad allowed himself five, and a harem
of concubines and sex slaves); the treatment of all women, including wives, as
chattel; death for adulterous women; death for apostates, homosexuals, and anyone
who slanders Muhammad or Allah; severe corporeal punishment for thieves,
deceivers and hypocriticalMuslims;
justifiable lying to infidels (taqiyya)
to gain their trust before enslaving, subjugating or killing them; poll or head
taxes (jizya) on kaffirs or infidels, or taxes on a whole group; and the prohibition
of alcohol, games, music, and the mixing of the sexes, even in mosques.

Today, however, young “radical” Muslims broadcast what can only be called
“Allah Rock” music over the Internet, or lull themselves into a jihadist trance by listening to
monotonous “official” Arabic music laced with lyrics about the greatness of
Allah and Muhammad and how the world’s going to pay for denying them and how
wonderful it would be to martyr oneself in a suicide vest and take as many
infidels as possible with one.

As he did with Abraham, Muhammad was not above recasting other biblical
and Judaic persons into strictly Islamic roles.

For example, per the Koran,
about the "end days," when the "Evil One," Dajjal, besieges
Damascus and threatens the First Mahdi, Jesus goes to the gates, exhales, and
many in the Evil One's army drop dead because they're kaffirs or infidels or unbelievers. Then righteous, true-believing
Muslims explode from the mountains to finish the job in an orgy of slaughter.

"Dressed in armor and wielding two swords and a shield, Jesus stalks
the Evil One on the battlefield. He slays him in the grand finale at one of the
gates of the city and leaves the battlefield with his shield splattered with
the blood of the Evil One." (p. 257)

Not exactly a pacifist fellow who turned the other cheek and loved his
enemy.

Further on in Mohammad's version of Christ, Christ will succeed the First
Mahdi and rule over a utopian world. Everyone will have a goat and a camel and
bushels of pomegranates each the size of a Chevy pickup. Christ will live on
for forty years, get married (no mention of the number of wives), have lots of
kids, then die, and will be privileged to be buried next to Muhammad. Then, on
the Last Day, in Seventh Heaven, Jesus, resurrected, will act as an
intercessionary in the judgment of the naked billions eligible to enter
Paradise or to be tossed into hellfire (after first being chopped up by Satan),
but may be overruled by Muhammad, the Supreme Intercessionary. What a court case load, and all the defendants
are nude, too!

Mohammad made up a lot of this stuff during his Friday sermons in Medina,
and people bought it, in fact, lapped it up. He was, as the colloquial line
goes, “a legend in his own mind.” And in the minds of his converts. In Medina,
when he was having one of his epileptic “visitations” with Allah by way of
Gabriel, believers would flock to his quarters in al-Qaeda (“the base”) to
witness it first-hand and to be the first to hear the latest
pronouncement.If Muhammad happened to
wash his hands in a bowl and spit in it, believers would rush to pass the bowl
around to splash the water and his spittle over their faces. That could be
called “gross groupiness.”

As for non-Muslims, and especially Jews, Muhammad made them the target of
submission (or “Islam”), subjugation, or death.

“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that
forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge
the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they
pay the Jizya with willing
submission, and feel themselves subdued.” (Koran,
9:29).

The truth is that many of Muhammad’s
converts were attracted to Islam by the prospect of seventy-two doe-eyed
renewable virgins in Paradise, especially if they martyred themselves in
battle, or to the promise of loot and sex slaves that their “right hands”
possessed. The nub and rub is that Muhammad could be said to be responsible for
the double meaning of “booty call,” although no Islamic scholar I know of is
likely to admit it. Muhammad made it an iron rule that he would take only
one/fifth of the booty, whatever its form: women to sell, camels, goats, sheep,
gold, silver, land, harvests. The rest went to his army, earlier consisting of
only a few hundred spiritual marauders and opportunists; later they numbered in
the thousands.

After an epileptic episode, Muhammad would
emerge from it and say in two voices – his own and Allah’s in what must be the
oddest ventriloquist act in history – “strike terror into the hearts of the
enemies of Allah” (Koran, 8:60). He
had the habit of speaking to his congregations as though he were, séance-style,
sans Ouija board, transcribing verbatim
the direct commands of Allah. Then he would switch to the humble role of “messenger”
of what Allah had just commanded.

Muhammad wouldn’t recognize Mecca today.
It’s being Disneyfied by the Saudis into a lush pay-as-you-go pilgrimage madhouse
(or anthill), complete with luxury hotels and apartment towers, shopping malls,
and even a Starbucks and perhaps a halal
McDonald’s. Not that it ever wasn’t a madhouse in its brick-and-mortar days, a
whirling maelstrom of white-garbed bodies performing their stations of the
crescent moon around the Kaaba during the Hajj.
But the Saudi makeover of Mecca, to judge by the Daily
Telegraph pictorial, resembles more Las Vegas than a pilgrimage destination,
with Muhammad the Unforgettable as its attraction.

F.W. Burleigh must be credited not only for
having researched Muhammad’s life and created a person with flesh and bones
(and an addled skull) from a vast storehouse of documented information, but for
having the courage to tell it “like it was” about history’s most notorious
“prophet.” His book is well worth the time to read.

I guarantee you will come away with a new
understanding of what makes Islam and jihadists
tick. Basically, it’s Muhammadan insanity armed with a razor-sharp sword
looking for a convenient neck to strike, or an empty, weak, malleable mind to
fill. And whether they’re called al-Qaeda, or the Taliban, or ISIS, or Hamas,
or Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood or any of its sundry and cousinly franchises
, they are all nihilistic psychotics.

6 comments:

Ed, another excellent expose of Islam. However evil that religion is, what do you think of the Western women as in the link below that are embracing it?

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/14/opinion/muslim-convert-irpt/

I have a felling that more women will be voluntarily embracing the veil. And these women are supposedly Christianity hating feminists. This phenomenon is so indicative of the current collapse of the West; ie it incorporates submission to Islam, Feminism's hatred of men, women pursuing some type of order in a subjectivist world and running straight into the arms of evil itself, etc..

But Objectivists never comment on this because it has nothing to do with economics or the imminent Christian theocracy that the Republicans somehow represent. From reading Objectivist literature you would never know that we are facing the 2nd fall of Rome.

Madmax: I read that same column on another news blog site. I'd have titled it, "I'm clueless, but I have freedom of thought, so I'm converting to Islam." She should have further on in her confession said, "I want to be something, so I've chosen to become nothing." I don't think she even grasps the meaning of "feminism," because if she did, she wouldn't be eager to join a cult or religion that makes men the ultimate Alpha males to be owned and obeyed.

Most Objectivists aren't going to comment on this phenomenon, because, as you say, it runs counter to their somewhat stale, hand-me-down mantra about an abrupt Christian theocracy thrust upon the country as Obama's agenda was abruptly thrust upon the country.

I will qualify that observation that, if there is a reaction against Obama and his friendship with Islam, it will be colored with a traditionalist "Back to God" sub-movement, in the way of "We reject Allah and Islam" way of thinking (or not thinking).

But here is what is interesting Ed. Leftists in general, feminists in particular, do not oppose Islam despite the fact that as you say, Islam is the *greatest* insult to Leftist egalitarian principles, ie alpha male harems, etc. Think about the Leftist rant against "rape culture" on college campuses. All those white college dudes with no game supposedly date raping women. But if you are going to crusade against that as "rape culture" what about Islam itself? Islam IS rape culture. Leftists looked the other way while 1400 British girls were raped by Muslims in Rotheram England. Why didn't they oppose "rape culture" then? It seems because its only rape if white men do it. And that's the rub. The modern Left seems to be animated by anti-white sentiment. It seemingly lies behind *everything* they believe in.

Islam systematically violates every Leftist precept there is. Yet the Left only encourages and emboldens Islam. Why? Perhaps you could write on this. My tentative view is that Leftists hate anything that is associated with white non-leftist culture so much they would ally with an evil like Islam in an attempt to destroy it. In essence, Leftists are motivated by a hatred of white, heterosexual, non-leftist males especially if there are associations with traditional Christianity, capitalism, pre-20th century European culture, traditional gender roles, law and order institutions (ie the military), and anything that hints at masculine pride. And the reason for that is what I don't know but I suspect that it has to do with parenting and early childhood. Something is going wrong with Leftists when they are young. But I don't know what.

Madmax: The king of anti-white culture is, of course, Obama. There is no other credible motive for or purpose to his vicious policy of open borders to Mexicans, South Americans, Somalians, Muslims of every ethic variety, but to dissolve “white” culture. That makes him the supreme racist. He has expressed indifference to the plight of the Yazidis, because they’re “sort of white,” and has said little or nothing about the ISIS policy of raping their women and killing their men. The Yazidis are, I’m certain, as bonkers about their religion as Muslims are about theirs. But they are truly a minority not really declaring jihad against all non-Yazidis. However, no one is brave enough to state in public that Obama is a racist, as much of one was Rev. Jeremiah Wright or Louis Farrakhan (or Al Sharpton, a frequent visitor to the White House, and Jesse Jackson).

The whole Progressive agenda, in lockstep with that policy, is also anti-white, anti-European, anti-West. Aged former-leftists like David Horowitz were “red diaper babies.” They’re the neo-cons now, siding with “patriotic” religionists and other parties (including much of the Tea Party). Their younger brethren are still leftists, but I call them the “Pampers Babies,” raised by liberal and left-leaning parents from the 1950’s onward, and suitably brainwashed or at least lobotomized in their critical faculties in their college years by professors and academics who took their cues from the Frankfurt School and other imported cultural philosophies. (Parenthetically, this importation of bad ideas began a bit after the Civil War, when Americans returned from their education in especially Germany.)

So, they’re not going to look askance at the rape culture of Islam – that would be “cultural imperialism” or the like – but will natter on about the alleged campus “rape culture.” That’s what they’ve been taught. They’re virtually reason-proof. The verities of political correctness, as far as their stunted minds are concerned, are engraved in stone. And, of course, a “rape culture” can’t be pinned on anyone but males, especially white males. Blacks are largely exempt from the charge, even though blacks have committed the most horrific crimes against white males and females. Those crimes get little or no media coverage. To report on them risks the charge of “racism.”

The violation of their principles by Islam bothers them not a whit, because to criticize Islam on that point would also be seen as Western hubris and “elitism.”

Bad ideas – and especially bad ideas imparted by parents and schools – can work their insidious ways into the minds of the young. They’re mostly defenseless. Many of them grow up to be passive yeah-sayers to every and any altruist idea (aka Leftist), or become activists of one stripe or another. They’re like the Muslims who protest their innocence regarding the atrocities committed by their activist coreligionist jihadists; they don’t commit the crimes, but don’t object to their being committed either, their protestations that ISIS et al. have nothing to do with Islam to the contrary notwithstanding.

Great analysis. What continually amazes me, in modern discussions of Islam, is that NO ONE seems willing to state the obvious: MUHAMMAD WAS INSANE. The evidence is all there in the Islamic source texts. If Muhammad were alive today, we'd lock him in the nearest nut house and destroy the key. The man was just THAT crazy. Muslims are brainwashed from birth to not see what a looney tune their "prophet" was, but what is wrong with the rest of humanity? Let's call a spade a spade. Muhammad simply wasn't playing with a full deck.